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Sunday, February 21, 2010

Tomato Tandoori Seitan, and Miso Seitan Stir fry

What do you get when you have a recipe planned and end up missing some of the basic ingredients needed?
You experiment and come up with two other great recipes.

I had planned on making jerk seitan for today. Only... I am completely out of soy/tamari sauce. The other recipes I wanted to try with seitan all contained brewers' yeast, something I finished up with my popcorn last night. I was a little stuck as my seitan was already prepared, but I had no idea how to season it without either soy sauce or brewers' yeast. Fortunately, with a little help from trusty ol' google, I made 2 delicious dishes using what I already had in my home. (The reason for 2 different dishes was so in case one of them flopped, hopefully the other would be decent.)
I ended up making an Indian style black bean and seitan dish, along with a miso based seitan stir fry.

I shared over here how to make seitan but didn't include any pictures of the process. Because of this, there may have been some confusion (and there were many questions as well). This time I took pictures during the seitan making process, and hopefully the instructions from here will be easier to follow now that there are pics.

I started off with 1 kilogram (2.2 lbs) of white flour. I mixed it with enough water to make a relatively stiff dough. (The exact consistency does not matter. You just need it to be dough as opposed to batter.)

After kneading it, I covered it in water. Again, a pic.

After kneading out the starch underwater, I was left with this beige colored, silly putty textured mass. This is the gluten. From the original 2.2 lbs, I got roughly 2 cups of wheat gluten.

I haven't tried it, but I was told you can use the starch washed off in the seitan making process as food for your sourdough starter, or as a thickener for soups/dishes.

At this point, I divided the gluten into two parts, for use in these two different dishes.

Miso Seitan Stir Fry

The typical way to make seitan is to boil it in a soy sauce based mixture. Being that I was out of soy sauce, I boiled the seitan in a mixture made out miso and worcestershire sauce.
Mix 3 tablespoons brown rice miso and 3 tablespoons worcestershire sauce with roughly 3 cups of water. Bring to a boil in a wide pot.
Wet your hands and then take seitan and break it into walnut sized chunks. Flatten these chunks in your hands so they're pretty thin and wide, and then drop them into the boiling mixture. Let simmer on a low heat, uncovered for about 20 minutes.
When finished, you should have a few spongy, waterlogged cutlets.
(I'm sorry there are no pictures of these last few steps.)
Remove the cutlets from the pot, stack them one on top of the other, and wrap the lot in a cheese cloth. Put something heavy on the cheese cloth, leave for 20 minutes, and let the weight push the liquid out of the seitan.
While you're pressing the seitan cutlets, bring the miso water back to a boil and let it become more concentrated. After 5 minutes on a rapid boil, turn it off and remove it from heat.
Take the seitan out of the cheese cloth and cut them into strips lengthwise, and then again cut them widthwise, depending on how large or small you like your pieces to be.

Take a non stick pan (please, I beg you- non stick only. Otherwise you'll repeat my mistake and loose half of the seitan to the bottom of the non-non stick pan.) and saute an onion.
When the onion is translucent, add the seitan. Stir fry till the seitan becomes golden, and add 3 carrots cut into matchsticks or a little bigger. When that is nearly cooked, add a diced green pepper and cook for another few minutes.

When all the vegetables are cooked, add some corn starch, a drop of sugar, and a pinch of salt (to taste) to the miso mixture, and pour it into the stir fry. Cook till it thickens.

Serve over rice.
This came out absolutely delicious- 5 stars- and is definitely a keeper. Lee kept on asking for seconds and thirds.

Tomato Tandoori Style Seitan

I had higher hopes for this recipe. I messed it up a drop and I'll let you know how so you don't repeat my mistake, but even so, this recipe earned a 3.5 or 4 stars.

Take 1 cup of cooked black beans. Blend it in a food processor until it is completely blended. (I did this wrong and didn't blend it all the way. Because I didn't, the texture wasn't as good as it could have been. If it isn't blending easily, add a little bit of water or oil and then blend it until it is a smooth puree.)
Add 1 cup of your prepared seitan and mix it up very well.

Mix the spices together with the mixture and form into a log. Wrap the log tightly in a piece of aluminum foil with both ends twisted. Bake in an oven on 350 for 90 minutes.
When finished, remove from the oven and let cool completely.
When cool, unwrap the log and cut it into cubes.

Saute an onion in a non stick pan. Add the seitan chunks and season liberally with turmeric, curry powder, and salt. Dice 2 large tomatoes and add them to the mixture, and add 1 cup of water.
Let simmer until tomatoes soften.

Serve over rice.
This gets 3.5 or 4 stars. Once I seasoned the mixture liberally with turmeric, curry powder and salt, it was quite tasty and its only detraction was that the seitan was a bit spongy, and that issue would have been resolved had I finished blending the beans into a paste first before mixing the lot.

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Hello there! I'm Penny, author of Penniless Foodie in the Wild, an adaptable cookbook for frugal people like myself who like to eat great food. I'm a mom of four who loves to blog about how to have the best life possible while living on a relatively low income. We're a "crunchy", gluten-free family, homeschooling, homebirthing, autism, natural parenting family.I'm always happy to receive emails from readers at pennilessparenting@yahoo.com.

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